DailyTech managed to snag a quad-core "Yorkfield" for a few quick benchmarks

Benchmarks of Intel’s Penryn based dual-core Wolfdale have appeared a couple times in the past month. The early benchmarks tested engineering sample processors and showed Wolfdale, on average, performing 5 percent faster, clock for clock then Conroe. However, benchmarks of the quad-core Yorkfield are virtually non-existent to the public.

Intel’s Yorkfield is not a native quad-core design. As with Kentsfield, Yorkfield features two dual-core dies fused together. The design results in each pair of cores having access to its own pool of shared L2 cache. Since Penryn has more cache, each pair of cores has access to 6MB of L2 for a total of 12MB – up from the 4MB per pair and 8MB total of Kentsfield.

Although Yorkfield uses a 45nm fab process and consumes less power, Intel plans to stick to its existing 95 Watt and 130 Watt thermal design power ratings. DailyTech previously presented quick and dirty benchmarks of AMD’s 1.6 GHz Barcelona processor last June. Today, DailyTech has a few quick and dirty benchmarks of Intel’s quad-core Yorkfield Core 2 processor, in an LGA775 package.

The testing configuration is as follows:

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700 @ 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz front-side bus

Intel Yorkfield 2.33 GHz, 1333 MHz front-side bus

Intel P35 Express based motherboard

2x1GB DDR3-1333 memory

AMD ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

Since Intel does not have a 2.33 GHz Kentsfield processor, a Core 2 Extreme QX6700 is used. The Core 2 Extreme QX6700 has an unlocked multiplier, which allowed us to clock it at 2.33 GHz with a 1333 MHz front-side bus.

SiSoft Sandra XII CPU-Arithmetic

MIPS

Kentsfield 2.33 GHz

Yorkfield 2.33 GHz

ALU

43003

43299

FPU

29981

34693

SiSoft Sandra XII CPU Multimedia

MIPS

Kentsfield
2.33 GHz

Yorkfield
2.33 GHz

ALU

257295

256216

FPU

140055

140301

SiSoft Sandra XII Memory Bandwidth

MB/s

Kentsfield
2.33 GHz

Yorkfield
2.33 GHz

ALU

6639

7124

FPU

6639

7121

Synthetic benchmarks do not really reveal too much of a performance difference between Kentsfield and Yorkfield. However, SiSoft Sandra XII does not contain SSE4 optimizations yet.

Cinebench 10 yields an approximate 8 percent boost in single and multithreaded rendering. Encoding a video file into DivX also yields a similar 8 percent performance boost.

Overall, with our limited time with Yorkfield, performance of the quad-core processor is roughly 8 percent faster clock for clock than Kentsfield. However, this is expected as Yorkfield is essentially a 45nm die shrink of Kentsfield with a few tweaks here and there.

Expect Intel to begin shipping Yorkfield in mass quantities in Q1 2008. Quad-core Xeon X5400 Harpertown processors, which are somewhat similar to Yorkfield, will ship in November.

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